The 3 Things...Our Children's Children Won't Learn In School

Back online! Thanks to a VERY generous donation by an unknown benefactor (Thanks, Mom and Dad), I am once again able to grace all of you with my brilliance!

Parent-Teacher Conferences this week! (Yay...) Has anyone ever had the teacher tell them, "Your kid is a vicious procrastinator, disrupts learning constantly, and is just a threat to future society as a whole"? No?? Just me?

Anyways, the meetings got me thinking about what our grandchildren will not have to learn that we had to learn....

1. Penmanship

It's a fact of life that technology renders pen and paper communication near obsolete. We grew up with book reports, essays, and diaries. Our grandchildren will only know .docs, .pdfs, and .txts. My kids do a lot of writing in class, but I read about schools installing more computers, and even using iPads to perform their schoolwork. Think about it. Kids don't even have to pass notes in class anymore. Texting takes care of that. When are our grandchildren going to have to put pencil to paper, besides.....well.....never.

2. How to compose a sentence. 

See that green squiggly line? Right-click and change. Grammar checking has become more and more common in standard software such as word processing, browsers, and even some chat clients. The ability to determine grammar mistakes by a computer virtually guarantees that our grandchildren won't have to learn how to properly conjugate verbs, and still sound like a CEO.

3. Deadlines

Again, back to technology, but it seems like it's the driving force behind societal changes at the moment. Future children won't need deadlines, because thanks to the internet, social media, and other networking platforms, assignments, meetings, possibly classes, tests, etc. will all be in real-time. The way they will turn in an assignment will be to upload a file when complete. Sure there may be the 100 page essay (they won't have to cram words into the margin to finish a sentence. Sigh.), but for the most part, they will be able to complete and grade assignments in real time, over a digital connection.

I feel so old. I still remember records. My parents owned an 8-track player. We had a TV with KNOBS.......ugh.

WTFriday!

I've been trying to control my temper since my heart attack, so that I don't stress myself to the point of having another hospital stay. As any parent can tell you, though, having children is stressful enough.

In order to become the awesomest passive-agressive father I can be, my wife has asked me to refrain from yelling to convey my displeasure. (Apparently, blogging to the entire internet is fair game, though!)

I had told my oldest daughter to return this school book a total of 5 times before yesterday. I found it stuffed in the back of a closet, where she stores her backpack.

After doing my lamaze breaths, yoga poses, and finally stopping my eye from twitching, I decided to verbalize my displeasure at her actions. A very public display of displeasure should deter future decisions to not heed my instructions.....right?